Sniper Wolf

In Metal Gear Solid, Sniper Wolf is a deadly assassin with a love of wolves and an inability to cover up her cleavage (despite the game taking place in Alaska). While she is not Snake’s love interest, his ally Otacon falls for her very hard.

This is meant to showcase Otacon’s extreme Stockholm Syndrome. But it’s downright surreal to hear him openly weeping about the murderer that had previously shot and captured Snake’s love interest Meryl so she could be tortured!

Princess Elise

There are plenty of things wrong with Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. But the thing that fans keep coming back to is Sonic’s relationship with Princess Elise.

We had spent years seeing Sonic have relationships with fellow furry characters like Amy Rose and Sally Acorn. Seeing him with a human woman just seems wrong, and we have a feeling this is the game romance that launched countless fans into the furry lifestyle.

Barret?!?

In Final Fantasy VII, different decisions you make can affect whether you go on a date with Tifa or Aeris. But if you screw up enough decisions, you’ll actually end up on a date with Barret.

The “date” is about as weird as you’d expect. The characters don’t say much, but Barret eventually chides Cloud about not asking one of the ladies out. This turns into a strange comedy bit where Barrett thinks Cloud might be sweet on the underaged Yuffie. Later, he accuses Cloud of wanting to date Barret’s daughter Marlene, a very young child!

Rose

Rose is Raiden’s love interest in Metal Gear Solid 2. At first, she seems like a supportive girlfriend with a few nagging tendencies. And then things go off the rails toward the end of the game.

You find out that an AI impersonating Rose has been talking to Raiden for God knows how long. At this point, you are forced to question the fundamentals of their relationship and even whether she ever really existed! Later games confirmed that Rose is real, but this whole incident was a powerful foreshadowing of their relationship later falling apart.

Kelly Chambers

In Mass Effect 2, Kelly Chambers is a truly unconventional love interest. She serves as Shepard’s yeomen, and you can romance her without affecting any of your romances with other characters.

However, it’s a little awkward that you can romance her at all considering that she is basically Shepard’s secretary, making the whole thing feel like a #MeToo scandal. And the fact that the relationship in the game culminates with Kelly putting on a skimpy outfit and doing erotic dancing for your character makes the romance that much stranger.

Cortana

What exactly is Cortana to Master Chief? They certainly seem like much more than friends, though they aren’t exactly lovers. Still, Chief seems to love her very much in his own weird way.

Over time, we get to see Cortana go from being a sarcastic voice in Chief’s head to a rampant A.I. threatening the galaxy. That whole storyline transforms their relationship from something sweet to something very tragic. Almost tragic enough to make you stop asking why Cortana, who could look like anything, dresses like a holographic stripper most of the time.

Bastila Shan

In Knights of the Old Republic, Bastila is not a strange love interest because of her own personality. As a haughty and stuffy Jedi, watching her slowly loosen up is one of the better parts of the game.

However, the big revelation is that (spoilers, kids!) your character is secretly Darth Revan and you have been brainwashed by the Jedi. Bastila nearly killed Revan once before, and watching them end up together is like watching a fan walk out of Hitler’s bunker and walk, hand-in-hand, into the sunset.

Mono

If you don’t already know, Shadow of the Colossus is a game about grief. Your main character Wander is trying to bring his dead girl, Mono, back to life. And he does so by making a demonic pact that requires him to kill every beautiful Colossus that wanders the land.

Part of the point of the game is that you start feeling very bad about all the killing. And while Wander is killed (or perhaps just transformed) by the end of the game, he is successful. Leaving behind a woman who knows she was resurrected only through an act of mass murder!

Lucas Kane

If you haven’t played it, Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy is a weird game. And the sex scene between Lucas Kane and Carla Valenti is one of the main reasons why.

When these characters hook up, Lucas Kane has actually died and then been reanimated. The whole sex scene is visually repulsive anyway (thanks for that, David Cage), but the fact that Carla is technically committing necrophilia with Lucas at the time makes everything even grosser.

Peach

In many ways, Peach is the archetypal video game love interest. She is the kidnapped princess that Mario must rescue as if he is a shining knight in armor.

But Peach is actually a fairly bonkers love interest for Mario. She is royalty and a powerful wizard of a faraway land (the plot for the original Super Mario Bros. game involved Bowser kidnapping her because she was the only one that could reverse his own dark magic) and Mario is a random dude from Brooklyn.

Throw in the fact that Mario seems to have a lot of side chicks and Peach being his main squeeze seems ever stranger!

Edi

Edi is first introduced in Mass Effect 2 as a bodiless A.I. And in a universe where rogue A.I. Geths nearly wiped out their creators, people are understandably wary of her. None more so than the Normandy’s pilot, Joker.

Eventually, Joker comes to like Edi, and then she gets a body in Mass Effect 3. This commences a relationship that even the characters in the game find strange: a human walking around with an A.I.-powered sexbot!

The Holsom Twins

Did you play Duke Nukem Forever? Yeah, hardly anybody did. So you were probably spared the sight of “The Holsom Twins.”

These two gals serve as Duke Nukem’s love interests, and they are modeled after the Olsen Twins with no subtlety whatsoever. But what makes it weird is that creepy Olsen “fans” spent years counting down until these girls were (barely) legal to date. The game added the pedo-bait characters and went out of its way to dress them up as naughty schoolgirls!

Tawna

Tawna is another character that didn’t seem weird at first. But things only got stranger over time.

At first, she was Crash Bandicoot’s generic damsel in distress girlfriend. But in a later game, she was replaced by a cute sister figure. When we finally see Tawna again, she is an alternate universe version that never dated Crash.

That’s much worse than just hearing another fake “it’s not you, it’s me.”

Johnny Sasaki

Does the name Johnny Sasaki ring a bell? He is the guard in Metal Gear Solid who ends up getting diarrhea and leaving Snake unguarded.

Insanely enough, he ends up with Meryl, Snake’s love interest from the fourth entry for the franchise. From a dude with a box fetish to a dude with IBS, Meryl sure knows how to pick them!

Rinoa Heartilly

Rinoa is a strange enough love interest when you first meet her. She is a plucky freedom fighter but eventually becomes a deadly sorceress.

This leads to endless confusion about Rinoa’s relationship with the main enemy, the sorceress Ultimecia. And all of this serves to undermine the romantic themes of what is meant to be a video game about her relationship with Squall, and we walk away without a very clear idea of who Rinoa really is.